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Summary
Summary
"A brilliantly conceived adventure into another time" ( San Francisco Chronicle ) by critically acclaimed author Umberto Eco.
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The year is 1327. Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. When his delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William turns to the logic of Aristotle, the theology of Aquinas, and the empirical insights of Roger Bacon to find the killer. He collects evidence, deciphers secret symbols and coded manuscripts, and digs into the eerie labyrinth of the abbey ("where the most interesting things happen at night") armed with a wry sense of humor and a ferocious curiosity.
Author Notes
Umberto Eco was born in Alessandria, Italy on January 5, 1932. He received a doctorate of philosophy from the University of Turin in 1954. His first book, Il Problema Estetico in San Tommaso, was an extension of his doctoral thesis on St. Thomas Aquinas and was published in 1956. His first novel, The Name of the Rose, was published in 1980 and won the Premio Strega and the Premio Anghiar awards in 1981. In 1986, it was adapted into a movie starring Sean Connery. His other works include Foucault's Pendulum, The Island of the Day Before, Baudolino, The Prague Cemetery, and Numero Zero. He also wrote children's books and more than 20 nonfiction books including Serendipities: Language and Lunacy. He taught philosophy and then semiotics at the University of Bologna. He also wrote weekly columns on popular culture and politics for L'Espresso. He died from cancer on February 19, 2016 at the age of 84.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This edition includes Eco's illuminating commentary, Postscript to the Name of the Rose. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Guardian Review
When the former hotel building in Milan where Umberto Eco lives was converted into flats, he preserved the winding corridors as a labyrinthine library, housing some 30,000 volumes. The shrine to learning seems apt for the creator of the 14th-century monastery in The Name of the Rose (1980), the medieval murder mystery that combined metaphysics, theology and the enigma of Aristotle's "lost" tome on comedy, with poisoned monks and the twists of a Sherlock Holmes whodunnit - a "book built of books". Eco was then already renowned in Italy as a professor of semiotics (the view of culture as an empire of signs) and newspaper columnist, with an academic reputation abroad as the author of some 20 scholarly works. But The Name of the Rose , his first novel, published when he was 48, propelled him to international stardom. The book sold more than 10m copies in some 30 languages (the English translation by William Weaver was published in 1983), an unprecedented boon Italians dubbed "Effetto Eco". In 1986 it was made into a film by Jean-Jacques Annaud, starring Sean Connery as the monk-detective, William of Baskerville. Eco's next two novels, Foucault's Pendulum (1988) and The Island of the Day Before (1994), were bestsellers too, spurring translations of his earlier critical works. Many praised the witty melding of popular genre fiction with arcane erudition. According to the novelist and academic David Lodge, Eco was one of the first to grasp the ideas of postmodernism: "He makes difficult material accessible by playfulness, or splicing together popular and high culture - which perhaps doesn't seem as groundbreaking now as it undoubtedly was then." Not all readers were convinced. Salman Rushdie, irritated by a "fiction about the creation of a piece of junk fiction that then turns knowingly into that piece of junk fiction", pronounced Foucault's Pendulum humourless and devoid of characterisation or credible dialogue. "Reader: I hated it," he wrote. Will Self, noting that Eco's novels were said to combine "exhaustive polymathism with thriller-style narrative drive", concluded: "I've never seen it." To Self, Eco occupies a "perverse and tendentious position" as a writer of "superficially 'intellectual' books that . . . convince a great number of people they are reading something with a certain cachet. This is a loathsome confidence trick." A suspicion arose, fuelled by newspaper "polls", that Eco's novels were more bought than read. The author dismisses the notion. As for critical snobbery, he recalls an Italian reviewer of The Name of the Rose who reversed his judgment, deciding that he liked the book after all when sales rocketed. "The question is not how many copies sell immediately, but how many readers you have 20 years after." At 70, Eco remains professor of semiotics at Bologna, the oldest university in Europe and his academic base for more than 30 years. Since 1993, when he founded it, he has been director of the Institute of Communications Disciplines, Italy's top cultural studies centre. He teaches three days a week, "for pleasure not money". According to the novelist Mario Fortunato, director of the Italian Cultural Institute in London, whose BBC4 profile of Eco, Renaissance Man, was shown on Wednesday, Eco enjoys the company of young people, "going to the trattoria every night with students, drinking and chatting; he's an old adolescent". Eco and his German-born wife, Renate Ramge, also have a flat in Paris and a 17th-century mansion near Urbino, whose former chapel, with its mountain view and "great silence", serves as Eco's study. In addition to novels, non-fiction and children's books, he has written a regular column in L'Espresso newsmagazine since 1985, and more recently in the Guardian. He feels driven to work at odd moments, since "our life is full of empty space", and sees his output as seamless: "I always do the same, in different forms." A constant traveller and guest lecturer, Eco speaks French, Spanish and German as well as Italian, and his fluent but accented English creates only occasional confusion (a startling disquisition on a great "ox" turns out to be about a "hoax"). Lodge, who met Eco at the 1979 conference that sparked his own novel Small World , finds him an "amusing and energetic raconteur with a good sense of humour about himself", an "important cultural figure on the 'global campus'". Fame has been disruptive, says Eco, "not in my way of thinking or living, but it obliged me to live a more private life". There are other pressures. His fourth novel, Baudolino (2000), published in an English translation by Weaver this month, has been a bestseller across Europe, including in Germany, where its 500,000 sales made it the biggest-selling hardback of all time. Last year Eco bowed to publisher friends and toured for three months. "At the end I was sick: my blood pressure jumped." Abandoning a recent attempt to stop smoking, he lights up frequently, though claims not to inhale. With Baudolino , Eco returns to the middle ages, during the 1204 Crusader siege of Constantinople. Baudolino was the patron saint of Eco's home town of Alessandria, in Piedmont, east of Turin, and was thought to predict the future. During the siege, Eco's Baudolino, a "little liar who could concoct bigger lies", spins tales to the medieval Greek historian Niketas, allowing Eco to "play a game of ambiguity about truth and lies: everything Baudolino invents did historically happen - but later. A liar lies about the present and the past, but Baudolino lies about the future; he's not a liar but a utopian." Baudolino relates his quest for the kingdom of marvels pictured in a letter - a great historical fake by the legendary priest-king, Prester John - said to have been written to the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa at around the time Alessandria was founded in 1168 to withstand Barbarossa's siege. "Marco Polo travelled to China with that letter in mind," says Eco. "Two centuries later, the first step towards the colonisation of Africa by the Portuguese was made under the same standard." Eco is fascinated by this power of human fantasy. For better or worse, fakes, false beliefs, the pursuit of myths, the projection of hallucinations and utopias, can lead to real discoveries, a mechanism he charted in his essays, Serendipities (1999). He says, "Captain Cook discovered Australia looking for the Terra Incognita. Christopher Columbus thought he was finding India but discovered America. History is full of events that happened because of an imaginary tale." Eco was fascinated by the idea of returning to his roots. He was born in 1932 in Alessandria, by then a small industrial town. His father, Giulio, was the chief accountant at an iron works, where he met Eco's mother, Giovanna Bisio, an office worker. "Nothing was interesting about my family - it was petit bourgeois," says Eco. His paternal grandfather was a bookbinder and "socialist typographer who organised strikes". During the second world war it was one of Eco's duties to go down to the cellar with a candle and pick up the charcoal: "I spent hours opening the old books and forgetting the coal." Among books he found were works by Jules Verne and Marco Polo, and included Darwin's The Origin of Species and piles of adventure comics. His maternal grandmother, barely schooled but a "compulsive reader" who subscribed to a mobile library, stoked this eclectic passion. "She had no real cultural discrimination: she could read dime novels as well as Dostoyevsky and Balzac." The dictatorship of Mussolini, in power since 1922, "shaped our minds in every moment and every aspect of life". Eco recalls being proud of his fascist uniform, and at 10 won first prize in a writing competition "for young Italian fascists". Yet he marvels at his escape. He had glimpsed other ways of thinking through Radio London and his father's whisperings with an old socialist and anti-fascist cousin. But with the fall of fascism, "like a butterfly from a chrysalis, step by step I understood everything". He heard on the radio in 1943 of Mussolini's imprisonment by the king. "It was inconceivable that this man, who since my birth had been a god, had been kicked out; I was astonished, amazed, amused." At the newsstand the next day he discovered the Fascists were not the only political party. "I'd never heard of these others; they were clandestine or exiled. But I discovered the meaning of plurality, democracy and freedom." He spent the German occupation of northern Italy starving ("probably that's why I'm alive today: if I was full of burgers I'd have died at 50") and dodging bullets traded by SS, fascists, and partisans - it was a great schooling, he says. "A child is a sponge; you could discriminate between good guys and bad guys." He rel ished American literature, saw jazz as an anti-fascist statement and took up the trumpet (he still plays the recorder). After the partisans took Milan in April 1945 he saw pictures of the death camps, and "realised what we'd been liberated from". At 14, Eco joined the Catholic youth organisation, and by 22 was a national leader, a "good militant". He resigned in 1954 during protests against the strongly conservative Pope Pius XII that led to the youth organisation's collapse. The crisis triggered his abandonment of Catholicism in favour of a lay religiosity. "Religion has nothing to do with God," he explains. "It's a fundamental attitude of human beings, who ask about the origins of life and what happens after death. For many the answer is a personal god. In my opinion it's religion that produces God, not the other way round." He dismisses as a journalistic legend reports that the Pope disapproves of his fiction. The Name of the Rose was attacked by the Vatican as a "narrative calamity that deforms, desecrates and offends the meaning of faith". Yet three of his 30 honorary degrees are from Catholic universities, he insists. "I'm free to do what I want," he says, though his policy is not to speak about God to the media. Eco's passion for medieval aesthetics began as a student at Turin university, where his doctoral thesis (published in 1956) was on St Thomas Aquinas. In 1954-59 he made cultural programmes in Milan for Italy's nascent national TV network, RAI, where he was badly paid. "It was an important experience," he says. "I followed the story of television from the beginning, from inside." In the 1950s "the Frankfurt school of [Theodor] Adorno was attacking the media. I elaborated a view that this instrument could be used in different ways. TV played an immense role in the linguistic unification of Italy, which was still a country of dialects." In a 1964 book of essays, translated as Apocalypse Postponed (1994), Eco argued against both an apocalyptic view of television (advanced by Marxist critics) and commercial obeisance to it. He is now more pessimistic. "Each programme is the same; it has become the religion of our time. Then there was a single channel and a political life in the piazzas. Today political events are nullified unless they're on TV." Yet if this bleak vision holds for the middle- aged, the young, he senses, may be rediscovering street protest. After military service in 1958, Eco joined the Milan publishers Bompiani, where he worked as a senior non-fiction editor from 1959- 75 and where he met his German wife, a graphic designer; they initially conversed in English. They were married in 1962. Renate now teaches architecture at Milan university, and works in museum education. The couple have two children, Stefano, a TV producer in Rome, and Carlotta, an architect in Milan. From 1956 Eco lectured in aesthetics, architecture, visual communications and semiotics at universities in Turin, Florence, Milan and Bologna. In 1959 he began a monthly column in Il Verri, an organ of the "neo-avant-garde". His spoofs and pastiches (Umberto Umberto falling for the aged "Granita" in a parody of Lolita) later appeared in English in Misreadings (1993) and How to Travel With a Salmon (1994). He was a founder-member of Gruppo 63, a radical avant- garde group in Milan in the 1960s, influenced by the French counter- culture guru Roland Barthes. Defying the taboo against serious analysis of popular culture, his gaze took in James Bond, Superman comics and Casablanca . "Pop songs and comic strips were considered trash, but they could also be masterpieces - like Peanuts," he says. "I'm not a fundamentalist, saying there's no difference between Homer and Walt Disney. But Mickey Mouse can be perfect in the sense that a Japanese haiku is." For Ian Thomson, a biographer of Primo Levi, Eco is "too easily accused of intellectual slumming, writing about his blue jeans or the porn star La Cicciolina. But he rightly says we should never be afraid to analyse 'inferior' manifestations. He wasn't the first to say this in Europe - Orwell wrote on comics and imperialism. But it defied Italy's precious literary salon." In his first major essay collection, The Open Work (1962) Eco argued for the reader's freedom to interpret a book as they choose, regardless of authorial "intentions" - a view that is now a literary commonplace. Like Barthes he saw culture as a web of signs, messages to be decoded for hidden meanings. He found in semiotics a unifying approach to the spectrum of communication, from his heroes Joyce and Borges to Hollywood. He explained the system in A Theory of Semiotics (1976) - written in English - and The Role of the Reader (1979). "I'm interested in everything but I haven't an all- embracing theory," he says. "The semiotic glance is excited by every aspect of life." Michael Caesar, professor of Italian at Birmingham University and author of a 1999 book on Eco (Polity Press), says: "He was part of an international movement, especially in France, but he was always a gifted publicist and a fast worker. His work had a political dimension, suggesting how we could resist the power of mass media through 'semiotic guerrilla warfare'; he used abstract philosophy to challenge the status quo." According to Lodge, "a lot of post- structuralist critics deliberately make what they do seem difficult and elitist. Umberto's the opposite: he delights in informing himself and others." Eco wrote The Name of the Rose after a publisher asked him to contribute to a series of short thrillers by prominent Italians who had never written fiction. Some readers have found in it echoes of the period in which he wrote it, when Italy was in chaos after the 1978 kidnap and murder by Red Brigades of the former prime minister Aldo Moro. Eco thought the initial print-run of 30,000 excessive, but the book sold 2m copies in Italy. In "narrating", as he calls writing novels, he begins with an image, such as that of a poisoned monk ("Why? Ask my psychoanalyst," he snaps). He then draws up physical plans and maps, to surmount constraints of time and place. "That's the pleasure in writing a novel: solving problems. It's a secret world you have. Everything you do is a chance to capture an image or event." Although he resists analysing his novels Eco published a book- length postscript (1984) to The Name of the Rose, in which he accepted the label postmodern. "The 20th-century avant-garde had reached a point of no return, from the fragmentation of the image to the blank canvas and musical silence," he says. "So the trend was to reconsider the artistic tradition with irony and quotation. Through the centuries, every painter or poet was under the influence of his predecessors, but only now are we conscious of that. It can mean you still pay homage, but with a wink to your reader." Some find this knowing postmodern irony tiresome and showy. Thomson feels Eco uses "postmodern tricksiness but without Borges's flair", and is a crude equivalent of Barthes, "all braggadocio and swagger, but without Barthes' talent to subvert". Yet Caesar insists on a darker side to Eco's work: "His semiotic theory is based on a metaphor: what we know of as culture is the signs that make it up; we can't know anything outside that. Eco takes a questioning view of truth that might be playful or despairing, pointing to a void." Feeling that The Name of the Rose lost much of its meaning in Annaud's film, Eco refused for years all requests to film Foucault's Pendulum (including one from the late Stanley Kubrick), but he has recently allowed a producer, a "faithful reader", to start work on a film script. He sees the book as the most "complex and ideologically concerned" of his novels. Writing it was a "torture" that took eight years. Though Eco feared a critical massacre, he had mixed notices, from Thomson's verdict of magnificently boring, to the Guardian's Jonathan Coe, who commended its "core of profoundly old-fashioned humanism". Taking its title from the 19th-century French physicist Leon Foucault, whose mechanism demonstrates the rotation of the earth, the novel saw three editors at a Milan publishing house trying to link every conspiracy theory in history. Their paranoid misinterpretation of a laundry list as a plot to take over the world satirised perverse misreadings and the deconstructionist theory associated with Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault - also attacked by Eco in The Limits of Interpretation (1990). According to Caesar, "in the early 60s he [Eco] was arguing that modern work tries to maximise the number of responses to it; by the 90s he was talking about the limits of interpretation. You start by trying to get away from rigid rules, then you acknowledge the limits of that freedom." His third novel, The Island of the Day Before , was set in the "first modern century", the 17th. Its hero is shipwrecked in a vessel off a Pacific desert island but unable to reach it because he cannot swim. He is also separated from it by the international date line, affording Eco both an image of frustrated desire and a metaphysical conundrum about time and space. Mario Fortunato feels Eco's novels have been less influential in Italy than his political presence as an important leftwing voice in debates on abortion, the mafia and corruption. "When Umberto was younger he was more radical, writing for the communist Il Manifesto newspaper. Now he's more reformist and moderate but his ideas are the same." Eco sees his as the normal role for a European intellectual. He professes to dislike the role of preacher or prophet and inveighs against their political use. But to Eco, the concept of duty is fundamental, "especially with a Catholic education. My duty as an intellectual is to do good books, but I also have duties as a citizen to write on the political situation: we have to tell aloud that something is rotten in the kingdom of Italy. Your duty is to do your job well and not to live in an ivory tower." Of the prime minister and media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi, Eco says: "Since he arrived in government, he has only made laws in his favour. [To him] there is no conflict of interest: his public and private interests are the same." Berlusconi's 90% monopoly of Italian television is a "tragedy for a democratic country". Eco was travelling during last month's huge Rome demonstration, led by the filmmaker Nanni Moretti, against the prime minister, who is facing corruption charges in a Milan court and is accused of using parliament to get the law changed so that he will not stand trial. Eco found Italian TV almost bereft of news coverage of the march, unless it was "summed up by a joke of Berlusconi's". Yet, Eco adds sharply, "the problem isn't Berlusconi but the 50% of Italians who voted for him". Some, like Thomson, criticise Eco for a "tone of swaggering self- importance: he sees the world as a web of signs waiting to be deciphered - by him." Others, such as the novelist Paul Bailey, stress his "questioning spirit". For Eco, a fanatical belief in absolute truth invites the notion of heresy and inquisition. In a public "confrontation" with Cardinal Martini - published as Belief and Non-Belief (1997) - Eco defended a secular morality, and he increasingly intervenes on ethical questions. In an essay in Five Moral Pieces (1997), written during the 1991 Gulf war, he argued for modern war to be made taboo. His more recent philosophical books have been The Search for the Perfect Language (1993) and Kant and the Platypus (1997), parables arguing for a restoration of "common sense" to philosophy. He is writing a book about translation, based partly on his Weidenfeld lectures on the subject in Oxford this summer. In Caesar's view, Eco was "lionised in the 1980s, especially in America, and now, because of the nature of celebrity, he's being knocked off his pedestal", though he is "writing some of his best work". Eco may not be in the same league as Italo Calvino, Alberto Moravia or Leonardo Sciascia, says Thomson, but he is Italy's "best known literary export", whose success paved the way for more translations of others' work. While Fortunato says Eco has had minimal influence on younger writers in his country, he acknowledges Eco was the first ambassador for Italian literature. "Eco's international success opened the door for others, like Antonio Tabucchi and Alessandro Baricco." The late writer Lorna Sage commended Eco's investment in the "sanitising power of mockery, irony, laughter", his "personal tradition of carnival scepticism". "Laughter, and why we laugh, always fascinated me," Eco says. In his most famous book a villainous monk fears the power of laughter to subvert "truth". He has a theory which may offer a clue to the light and shade in his own work: "Man is the only laughing animal because, unlike other animals, we know we have to die. Laughter is a way to tame death, a way not to take our death too seriously, by not taking too seriously our life." Umberto Eco will be in conversation with Maya Jaggi for English PEN at Cecil Sharp House on Friday October 25 at 6pm (tickets 020- 7586 2022). Baudolino is published by Secker & Warburg on Tuesday at pounds 18. To order a copy for pounds 16 plus p&p call the Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979. Life at a Glance Umberto Eco Born: January 5 1932; Alessandria, Piedmont, Italy. Education: Liceo Plana, Alessandria; University of Turin, PhD 1954. Married: 1962 Renate Ramge (one son, Stefano; one daughter, Carlotta). Career: 1954-59 cultural editor, RAI, Milan; '58-59 military service; '59-75 senior non-fiction editor, Bompiani, Milan; '56-64 lecturer, Turin University; '66-69 professor of visual communications, Florence University; '69-71 professor of semiotics, Milan Polytechnic; '71-75 associate professor of semiotics, '75- professor of semiotics, '93- director Institute of Communications Disciplines, Bologna University. Some books (in English): 1976 A Theory of Semiotics; '79 The Role of the Reader; '83 The Name of the Rose; '86 Faith in Fakes; Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages; '88 Foucault's Pendulum; '89 The Open Work; '90 The Limits of Interpretation; '93 Misreadings; '94 How To Travel With a Salmon; '94 Six Walks in the Fictional Woods; Apocalypse Postponed; '95 The Island of the Day Before; '99 Kant and the Platypus, Serendipities; 2000 Belief or Non-Belief; 2001 Five Moral Pieces: 2002 Baudolino. Caption: article-ecoprof12.1 With Baudolino , Eco returns to the middle ages, during the 1204 Crusader siege of Constantinople. Baudolino was the patron saint of Eco's home town of Alessandria, in Piedmont, east of Turin, and was thought to predict the future. During the siege, Eco's Baudolino, a "little liar who could concoct bigger lies", spins tales to the medieval Greek historian Niketas, allowing Eco to "play a game of ambiguity about truth and lies: everything Baudolino invents did historically happen - but later. A liar lies about the present and the past, but Baudolino lies about the future; he's not a liar but a utopian." Some find this knowing postmodern irony tiresome and showy. [Ian Thomson] feels Eco uses "postmodern tricksiness but without [Borges]'s flair", and is a crude equivalent of [Roland Barthes], "all braggadocio and swagger, but without Barthes' talent to subvert". Yet [Michael Caesar] insists on a darker side to Eco's work: "His semiotic theory is based on a metaphor: what we know of as culture is the signs that make it up; we can't know anything outside that. Eco takes a questioning view of truth that might be playful or despairing, pointing to a void." Feeling that The Name of the Rose lost much of its meaning in [Jean-Jacques Annaud]'s film, Eco refused for years all requests to film Foucault's Pendulum (including one from the late Stanley Kubrick), but he has recently allowed a producer, a "faithful reader", to start work on a film script. He sees the book as the most "complex and ideologically concerned" of his novels. Writing it was a "torture" that took eight years. Though Eco feared a critical massacre, he had mixed notices, from Thomson's verdict of magnificently boring, to the Guardian's Jonathan Coe, who commended its "core of profoundly old-fashioned humanism". Of the prime minister and media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi, Eco says: "Since he arrived in government, he has only made laws in his favour. [To him] there is no conflict of interest: his public and private interests are the same." Berlusconi's 90% monopoly of Italian television is a "tragedy for a democratic country". Eco was travelling during last month's huge Rome demonstration, led by the filmmaker Nanni Moretti, against the prime minister, who is facing corruption charges in a Milan court and is accused of using parliament to get the law changed so that he will not stand trial. Eco found Italian TV almost bereft of news coverage of the march, unless it was "summed up by a joke of Berlusconi's". Yet, Eco adds sharply, "the problem isn't Berlusconi but the 50% of Italians who voted for him". - Maya Jaggi.
Kirkus Review
Fueled by bookish ingenuity instead of flesh-and-blood vitality, this brilliant Borgesian-Nabokovian historical--part pageant, part whodunit--shines with a distinctly dry light: Eco is a professor of semiotics (at Bologna University) with a versatile style (admirably handled by translator Weaver) and an awesome knowledge of the Middle Ages The story concerns a series of murders at a mythical Benedictine abbey somewhere near the Ligurian coast in 1327. The master detective is a wise and tolerant Franciscan scholar, Brother William of Baskerville, while a young Benedictine monk, Adso of Melk, plays the part both of narrator and inevitable sidekick/apprentice-sleuth. The dense and finely spun mystery eventually revolves around the last remaining copy of Aristotle's second book of the Poetics (now lost), his writings on comedy. And this precious manuscript is not just a deadly weapon--its pages have been dusted with poison by a fanatical blind monk--but its imagined contents come to symbolize humanity's ultimate defense against the bigotry and political horror swirling around in the world outside the monastery: lethal feuds between Emperor Louis IV and Pope John XXII; the Inquisition; witchhunts; pogroms; the Albigensian crusade; Fra Dolcino's bloody uprising and its far more savage suppression. Finally, then, when the manuscript is deliberately burned, the apocalyptic conflagration suggests the triumph of a very 20th-century terrorism that aims to mangle mind and body: the insidious obscurantist, Jorge of Burgos, may have been exposed, but a once-peaceful monastic microcosm now lies in ruins. . . and Brother William is doomed to die in the plague of 1348 (which may be meant as a parallel to nuclear holocaust). Eco has the learning to paint an ornate medieval panorama, the inventiveness to fill it with elegant conundrums (labyrinthine architecture, recondite Latin allusions, etc.). But his characters are stiff and two-dimensional; they talk too much, if eloquently; and Eco may ultimately be less a novelist than a preacher. Still: a rich, fascinating failure--with clever, tapestry-like appeal for a limited, historically-minded audience. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Eco, an Italian philosopher and best-selling novelist, is a great polymathic fabulist in the tradition of Swift, Voltaire, Joyce, and Borges. The Name of the Rose, which sold 50 million copies worldwide, is an experimental medieval whodunit set in a monastic library. In 1327, Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate heresy among the monks in an Italian abbey; a series of bizarre murders overshadows the mission. Within the mystery is a tale of books, librarians, patrons, censorship, and the search for truth in a period of tension between the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire. The book became a hit despite some obscure passages and allusions. This deftly abridged version, ably performed by Theodore Bikel, retains the genius of the original but is far more accessible. Foucault's Pendulum, Eco's second novel, is a bit irritating. The plot consists of three Milan editors who concoct a series on the occult for an unscrupulous publishing house that Eco ridicules mercilessly. The work details medieval phenomena including the Knights Templar, an ancient order with a scheme to dominate the world. Unfortunately, few listeners will make sense of this failed thriller. The Island of the Day Before is an ingenious tale that begins with a shipwreck in 1643. Roberta della Griva survives and boards another ship only to find himself trapped. Flashbacks give us Renaissance battles, the French court, spies, intriguing love affairs, and the attempt to solve the problem of longitude. It's a world of metaphors and paradoxes created by an entertaining scholar. Tim Curry, who also narrates Foucault's Pendulum, provides a spirited narration. Ultimately, libraries should avoid Foucault's Pendulum, but educated patrons will form an eager audience for both The Name of the Rose and The Island of the Day Before.-James Dudley, Copiague, N.Y. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
PROLOGUE In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. This was beginning with God and the duty of every faithful monk would be to repeat every day with chanting humility the one never-changing event whose incontrovertible truth can be asserted. But we see now through a glass darkly, and the truth, before it is revealed to all, face to face, we see in fragments (alas, how illegible) in the error of the world, so we must spell out its faithful signals even when they seem obscure to us and as if amalgamated with a will wholly bent on evil. Having reached the end of my poor sinner's life, my hair now white, I grow old as the world does, waiting to be lost in the bottomless pit of silent and deserted divinity, sharing in the light of angelic intelligences; confined now with my heavy, ailing body in this cell in the dear monastery of Melk, I prepare to leave on this parchment my testimony as to the wondrous and terrible events that I happened to observe in my youth, now repeating all that I saw and heard, without venturing to seek a design, as if to leave to those who will come after (if the Antichrist has not come first) signs of signs, so that the prayer of deciphering may be exercised on them. May the Lord grant me the grace to be the transparent witness of the occurrences that took place in the abbey whose name it is only right and pious now to omit, toward the end of the year of our Lord 1327, when the Emperor Louis came down into Italy to restore the dignity of the Holy Roman Empire, in keeping with the designs of the Almighty and to the confusion of the wicked usurper, simoniac, and heresiarch who in Avignon brought shame on the holy name of the apostle (I refer to the sinful soul of Jacques of Cahors, whom the impious revered as John XXII). Perhaps, to make more comprehensible the events in which I found myself involved, I should recall what was happening in those last years of the century, as I understood it then, living through it, and as I remember it now, complemented by other stories I heard afterward -- if my memory still proves capable of connecting the threads of happenings so many and confused. In the early years of that century Pope Clement V had moved the apostolic seat to Avignon, leaving Rome prey to the ambitions of the local overlords: and gradually the holy city of Christianity had been transformed into a circus, or into a brothel, riven by the struggles among its leaders; though called a republic, it was not one, and it was assailed by armed bands, subjected to violence and looting. Ecclesiastics, eluding secular jurisdiction, commanded groups of malefactors and robbed, sword in hand, transgressing and organizing evil commerce. How was it possible to prevent the Caput Mundi from becoming again, and rightly, the goal of the man who wanted to assume the crown of the Holy Roman Empire and restore the dignity of that temporal dominion that had belonged to the Caesars? Thus in 1314 five German princes in Frankfurt elected Louis the Bavarian supreme ruler of the empire. But that same day, on the opposite shore of the Main, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, and the Archbishop of Cologne elected Frederick of Austria to the same high rank. Two emperors for a single throne and a single pope for two: a situation that, truly, fomented great disorder. . . Two years later, in Avignon, the new Pope was elected, Jacques of Cahors, an old man of seventy-two who took, as I have said, the name of John XXII , and heaven grant that no pontiff take again a name now so distasteful to the righteous. A Frenchman, devoted to the King of France (the men of that corrupt land are always inclined to foster the interests of their own people, and are unable to look upon the whole world as their spiritual home), he had supported Philip the Fair against the Knights Templars, whom the King accused (I believe unjustly) of the most shameful crimes so that he could seize their possessions with the complicity of that renegade ecclesiastic. In 1322 Louis the Bavarian defeated his rival Frederick. Fearing a single emperor even more than he had feared two, John excommunicated the victor, who in return denounced the Pope as a heretic. I must also recall how, that very year, the chapter of the Franciscans was convened in Perugia, and the minister general, Michael of Cesena, accepting the entreaties of the Spirituals (of whom I will have occasion to speak), proclaimed as a matter of faith and doctrine the poverty of Christ, who, if he owned something with his apostles, possessed it only as usus facti. A worthy resolution, meant to safeguard the virtue and purity of the order, it highly displeased the Pope, who perhaps discerned in it a principle that would jeopardize the very claims that he, as head of the church, had made, denying the empire the right to elect bishops, and asserting on the contrary that the papal throne had the right to invest the emperor. Moved by these or other reasons, John condemned the Franciscan propositions in 1323 with the decretal Cum inter nonnullos. It was at this point, I imagine, that Louis saw the Franciscans, now the Pope's enemies, as his potential allies. By affirming the poverty of Christ, they were somehow strengthening the ideas of the imperial theologians, namely Marsilius of Padua and John of Jandun. And finally, not many months before the events I am narrating, Louis came to an agreement with the defeated Frederick, descended into Italy, and was crowned in Milan. This was the situation when I -- a young Benedictine novice in the monastery of Melk -- was removed from the peace of the cloister by my father, fighting in Louis's train, not least among his barons. He thought it wise to take me with him so that I might know the wonders of Italy and be present when the Emperor was crowned in Rome. But the siege of Pisa then absorbed him in military concerns. Left to myself, I roamed among the cities of Tuscany, partly out of idleness and partly out of a desire to learn. But this undisciplined freedom, my parents thought, was not suitable for an adolescent devoted to a contemplative life. And on the advice of Marsilius, who had taken a liking to me, they decided to place me under the direction of a learned Franciscan, Brother William of Baskerville, about to undertake a mission that would lead him to famous cities and ancientabbeys. Thus I became William's scribe and disciple at the same time, nor did I ever regret it, because with him I was witness to events worthy of being handed down, as I am now doing, to those who will come after us. I did not then know what Brother William was seeking, and to tell the truth, I still do not know today, and I presume he himself did not know, moved as he was solely by the desire for truth, and by the suspicion -- which I could see he always harbored -- that the truth was not what was appearing to him at that moment. And perhaps during those years he had been distracted from his beloved studies by secular duties. The mission with which William had been charged remained unknown to me while we were on our journey, or, rather, he never spoke to me about it. It was only by overhearing bits of his conversations with the abbots of the monasteries where we stopped along the way that I formed some idea of the nature of this assignment. But I did not understand it fully until we reached our destination. Our destination was to the north, but our journey did not follow a straight line, and we rested at various abbeys. Thus it happened that we turned westward (though we ought to have been going east), almost following the line of mountains that from Pisa leads in the direction of the pilgrim's way to Santiago, pausing in a place which, due to what occurred there, it is better that I do not name, but whose lords were liege to the empire, and where the abbots of our order, all in agreement, opposed the heretical, corrupt Pope. Our journey lasted two weeks, amid various vicissitudes, and during that time I had the opportunity to know (never enough, I remain convinced) my new master. Excerpted from The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
